Ask HN: How do you organise PDFs/eBooks?

[p0llard]

I try to obtain a digital copy of every physical book I buy, and I have quite a lot of books in digital format only; recently I decided to try and organise the mess.

I practically live in the terminal, and I use very few GUI programs these days, so I'm reluctant to use something like Calibre which I think is too bloated for my purposes. Essentially my requirements are a system that allows for hierarchical categorisation of books, and is easily navigable from the terminal.

The solution I've come up with is to use the filesystem as a "category tree" (so I might have "./Computer Science/Abstract Interpretation/...", or "./Mathematics/Mathematical Logic/...") with softlinks to directories in a hidden "store" which actually contain the books as the leaf nodes; this way I can have the same book in multiple categories, and I find it very easy to find whatever I'm looking for. I've found this works particularly well when combined with a terminal file manager such as ranger, and a fuzzy searcher such as fzf.

I've written a small tool which parses YAML metadata files inside the store and automatically generates the library structure based on the categories I assign.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has come up with a solution to this problem, or is aware of a pre-existing solution?

[simonblack]

I practically live in the terminal too. Most of my virtual desktops have at least two xterms, and usually more.

But I recognise that calibre does such a good job that I wouldn't be without it.

These are my calibre libraries:

   1.5G    amazon_bought
   1.9G    calibre_library
   9.6M    calibre_porn
   4.0K    comics
   2.8G    computing
   4.3G    fiction_collection
   7.4G    julie_books
   1.2G    pdf_books

[michaelmrose]

Why not a terminal interface to calibre?

[p0llard]

I'm really quite reluctant to touch it at all; on my Arch machine the installation will take up 366.38 MiB (including dependencies), which feels horribly bloated; my understanding is that it "does everything", but I prefer to subscribe to the UNIX philosophy.

Does Calibre come with a fully fledged command line interface? I wasn't able to find much in the documentation, and I'm reluctant to touch the codebase having heard various horror stories.